Chapter 1

Jen opened her tiny eyes, it was very early Christmas morning and it was quite dark in her cool bedroom that the three-year-old shared with her toddler sister. There was just a narrow ray of moonbeam peeping through the gap in the curtains which revealed to her a silent movement, a momentary flash of white.

There, she thought she could see someone in dark clothing trimmed with white, a hat pulled over a moon white face. He was placing a tiny wrapped present at the foot of her bed. The figure moved through the moonlight beam again to move towards the chimney. He was a young man and didn’t have a beard, but it was, it had to be, she knew with certainty, that he was Santa!

“Santa, is that you?” she asked, in her tiny voice hovering between fear and wonder.

“Hush, Jennifer, go to sleep, now,” Santa said quietly in a deep but reassuring, comforting voice, that wasn’t frightening at all. Anyone else in that bedroom at that time of night and three-year-old Jen would have merrily screamed her head off. But no, this was Santa and, after all, he had every right to be there, the whole family had invited him by several letters to come. Jen had even signed a card she had made herself at pre-school, with glitter stuck on the front of it. Besides, his calm voice assured her there was nothing at all to be afraid of, so she wasn’t afraid. After all, Jen reasoned, he always came every Christmas and brought only joy and pleasure into her world, nothing bad had ever happened with Santa. He continued in his calm manner, “It’s not quite Christmas morning yet, Jennifer, so you be a very good little girl and go right back to sleep.”

“OK, Santa,” Jen said, and so she settled down easily and instantly fell back to sleep.

It was only when she woke up, bright and refreshed that she realised that she remembered every single detail, and that Santa didn’t look at all like she had expected from all the pictures she had been shown at school and in the library. He looked nothing at all like Old St Nicholas, although some things were exactly as she imagined. Like the red coat lined with white fur, and big black boots, and the red hat, and, and, and - she had to take a deep breath - and the big red sack. Those things she expected and that was why she hadn’t been afraid that he was there in her and her sister’s bedroom in the middle of the night.

But what she had noticed that was so different, was that this Santa was a young man, with no whiskers. Jennifer imagined he was younger even than her Daddy. She told her Mummy and Daddy about the dream and they only thought that it was a funny dream, and told her that it was nothing at all to worry about. All little girls became obsessed with the build up leading to Christmas Night and for three-year-olds like her, this was the first Christmas that she could really appreciate as something special. So she didn’t worry about Santa’s visit and neither did Mummy and Daddy.

There was one little present that year, however, that nobody noticed, or claimed to have sent it, so she couldn’t write a thank you letter. The gift was packed in a box, and beautifully wrapped, but without a label. It was a tiny bracelet of wooden beads, that she wore every day for several years until the string broke, and she lost too many beads to salvage it.

And every year after, she had that self same dream, sometimes twice a year on or near Christmas Eve.

Every year for the next 26 years.

In her 29th year she had the same dream again, almost exactly as the usual one, but this time there was one significant and immediately apparent difference.

Jennifer sat bolt upright and groaned as soon as she realised ‘where’ she was and, more importantly, exactly ‘when’ it was.

The ‘where’ was her tiny city one-bedroom studio flat of course. Where else would she be on a Thursday night? At her little home of course. She did nothing in the evenings during midweek, and not a lot more during the weekends. Her life was currently in limbo, so where else would she be on the night of the 30th of November?